On September 8, 2017, a voice on the phone uttered “no” after I had asked
if our only son was still breathing.
That "no" will ring in my heart forever...
The call ended true happiness for me, as you can imagine. But it did not end my desire for answers—and a craving to extract some meaning from our personal grief.
The culprit? Fentanyl.
My son had fallen victim to a Xanax pill he had bought on campus—a pill that turned out to be laced with the deadly opioid that ended his life that night
For what seemed like hours, I sat on the side of the highway until I began to experience some grief stricken motivation
What makes moments like this most frightening was that this could've happened to anyone…
This was my son, a University of Colorado sophomore. He was a good kid… The last kid you'd expect this out of.
I knew from there one out that I had to do whatever I could to keep other parents from receiving that same call. We had to combat the opioid epidemic—the worst drug crisis in American history.